On 29.06.2017 18:07, Daniel P. Berrange wrote: > On Thu, Jun 29, 2017 at 05:46:26PM +0200, Thomas Huth wrote: >> On 29.06.2017 17:06, Paolo Bonzini wrote: >>> >>> >>> On 29/06/2017 10:46, Thomas Huth wrote: >>>>> Patches 7,8 are the removal, marked RFC... let's debate! >>>> ... but NACK for a direct removal. Common sense is to make obsolete >>>> features as deprecated first and then wait for 2 public releases before >>>> the final removal, so that users still have a chance to speak up in case >>>> they still need the feature and are willing to maintain it. >>> >>> I think this is a slightly different case than what is in >>> http://wiki.qemu.org/Features/LegacyRemoval. >>> >>> TCI is enabled only with a specific configure argument if your machine >>> is not supported by TCG. This would break _build_ configurations, not >>> user configurations. It's a remote possibility that users are building >>> their own QEMU, with TCI enabled, to work around a TCG bug. So we can >>> be more speedy in removing the code. >> >> You never know ... it's unlikely, but there might be people around who >> run configure with "--enable-tcg-interpreter" on purpose. And why the >> hurry for removing this? It's been around in the current shape since >> years, so waiting for two more releases does not hurt, does it? > > The flipside is that even if we delete it, if someone does suddenly > care, the code is still there in git & easy to undelete again. Given > that we believe there are zero users, it is known broken in many > ways, and TCG provides a working alternative, I don't see a strong > reason to not just kill it right away.
At least I was using TCI a couple of times during the last years (when I was suspecting a bug in the normal TCG backend, so I could compare). There might be other people, too, so I would not dare to say that there are zero users! Though I used it a couple of times in the past, I personally would not object the removal of TCI nowadays since the normal TCG backends have become pretty mature ... but other users of TCI might have a different opinion here, so let's mark it as deprecated now and remove it next year (unless somebody speaks up and explains why it should not be removed). Thomas